Microblog Memes

I'm always mildly concerned about how shocked people are about animals being conscious beings with feelings. Do people really think we are mentally that different from other animals with brains?

Rats are more compassionate than insurance companies CEOs.

Capitalism wants us to believe that it's the only stable solution, because it comes close to the natural order, and that in nature there is only selfish behaviour, eat or get eaten, homo homini lupus and so on. The truth is, this supposed natural state is completely made up and animals and human beings naturally behave much more selflessly than what is expected from us under capitalism.

The owners use their captured public education and for profit media to turn us on one another and make us monsters.

They tell us avarice/greed, a well known character deficit and social blight for thousands of years is instead virtuous rational self-interest.

They force us to compete against one another rather than cooperate with one another as the basis of our economy, when an economy is meant to be a lowly tool of society for the explicit use of maximizing the efficient, equitable distribution of goods and services for the benefit of the citizens of the society. Our tail wags the dog. We are slaves to economic growth/metastasis we as a society do not benefit from.

The problem is that the sociopaths, mentally ill people literally incapable of empathy, something most humans have a strong need to exercise, that are among us quickly game society using their mental deficit as an advantage to take more than they need and manipulate others into elevating them, then manipulate those below them into fighting one another perpetually to stay on top.

Humans are social creatures. We've been conditioned to act as monsters, condemning our fellow humans literally dying in our streets of exposure and capital defense force brutality as "lowering our property values."

This isn't natural. It's why our nation's mental health is basically its own apocalypse of mass depression, anxiety, and never ending trauma. We are strongly discouraged from supporting one another, as we're supposed to do the impossible, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, then claim we did it alone. That's the American delusion. 🇺🇸

After observing all of the animals I've ever lived with, I've come to the opinion (unsupported, I suppose, by any real evidence) that empathy is an important part of being alive. I think every living being has empathy, and humans just got quite good at beating it out of other humans to the point where displaying psychopathic traits became something culturally celebrated.

We've been trained to be this way, and we need to reverse that trend.

Meanwhile humans, when put thru the same experiment, realize they can make the human in the unpleasant box pay $ if it wants out. They then learn to create more boxes for more profit.

Ok, but let's say they is a toy train and it splits into two tracks and put the rat at the lever.

The Washington Post still has the article up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html
And here's the science article that prompted it:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1210789

and here's an old archive.org copy of it before the Washington Post started blocking the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140114012833/http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-new-model-of-empathy-the-rat/2011/12/08/gIQAAx0jfO_story.html

now make the rats comprehend fascism.

Would be an interesting study if that was possible.

Rats. Can't use the term as an insult anymore considering they're more human than we are.

Don't think there has ever been much dispute of a rat's intellect

I like the one where they gave rats a lot of food and space (rat paradise) and let them breed till they were crawling over eachother till there wasnt enough food for them all. When most of them died and food was available once more, the remainders stopped eating and all the rats died.

Rats are interesting but I think the guy that programmed them left in some bugs.

I wonder about this in animals all the time. Like, many animals seem to really enjoy being loved on and getting scritches, have a relationship with their owner or caregiver, are happy to see them and snuggle up… but in the wild they might be mostly solitary, only interacting with their own kind for mating and maybe raising young. Yet they’re often very different from the (eat sleep reproduce survive) basic wild animal when given the opportunity. They have personalities, happiness, etc.

That sounds eerily similar to a situation in Secret of NIMH (the book, not the movie), when the rats

A lot of animals are better at solving "prisoners dilemma" situations than us. Most animals would rather work together for the greater good but I guess they haven't heard of capitalism.

Couldn't this be explained by the "tit-for-tat" hypothesis? That selfless behaviour is learned in communal animals, and that its implied it will be you who need help next time?

I think we shouldn't underestimate human empathy. The problem is just that we build structures to avoid it. Rich people choose to not see poor people too much or they would feel empathy and be inclined to help them. If the poor are far away, merely an abstraction that is said to exist, then their existence is not felt strongly enough to trigger an empathy response. Surely there are exceptions to some degree, but I think humans are very empathetic and that's one of our great powers.

... which isn't news to me.

For a time it seemed that everybody wanted to shit on animals as being way inferior to humans in every way, including lacking empathy emotion feelings and stuff.

But that was always wrong. Who has ever worked with animals be it horses dogs or farm animals knows they have a soul. Well, but also a lot of them are just evil bastards.

Rats live like 2 years.

In two years, they learn how to be better to each other than a large part of the human race.